Many EA orgs say they place a lot of financial value on their previous hire. What does that mean, if anything? And why aren’t they hiring faster?

In our 2017 and 2018 sur­veys of EA or­gani­sa­tion lead­ers, the me­dian re­spon­dent re­ported be­ing will­ing to forego very large amounts of ad­di­tional dona­tions to hold on to their re­cent hires—sev­eral hun­dred thou­sand dol­lars for a ju­nior em­ployee, and mil­lions for a se­nior one.

How­ever, com­menters on this fo­rum and el­se­where have pointed to two ob­ser­va­tions that seem to be in ten­sion with these figures:

Th­ese or­gani­sa­tions typ­i­cally aren’t hiring a large num­ber of peo­ple, opt­ing in­stead for a more grad­ual ap­proach (though it’s some­thing like 30-50 over the last year, so more than it might seem).

Can­di­dates who on their face seem qual­ified are some­times turned away af­ter they ap­ply.

How can this make sense?

One pos­si­bil­ity is that the sur­vey re­sponses are wrong. We list weak­nesses with the method­ol­ogy in the ar­ti­cle about the sur­vey. But there are other pos­si­bil­ities.

Below we offer a po­ten­tial ex­pla­na­tion of what is go­ing on. In the pro­cess we hope to clar­ify that the an­swers to the above sur­vey ques­tion are far from a de­ci­sive con­sid­er­a­tion in favour of work­ing at those or­gani­sa­tions.

Most im­por­tantly, we asked the or­gani­sa­tions to value typ­i­cal re­cent hires. So this is a an ex post es­ti­mate of the value of re­cent hires, rather than an ex ante es­ti­mate of the value of fu­ture hires.

Fu­ture hires need to be searched for, se­lected, trained and come to be trusted. Th­ese are large ad­di­tional costs, since they con­sume se­nior staff time. Even if you do ev­ery­thing right, there’s a good chance that new hires won’t work out. The or­gani­sa­tions also have a limited num­ber of man­age­ment slots in which to add new staff. Read more in this great post by GiveWell.

Th­ese fac­tors mean both that ex­ist­ing staff are very valuable, but the ex­pected re­turns of hiring new staff may not be high—and in par­tic­u­lar, may not beat the re­turns of other ac­tivi­ties.

What does this mean for whether you should try to work at one of these or­gani­sa­tions? If you’ve already got an offer (or could eas­ily get one be­cause they’re already fa­mil­iar with your work) then work­ing there is po­ten­tially very im­pact­ful. It also means that it’s valuable to find out if you could get one of these roles, so long as it’s not too ex­pen­sive to learn. But it doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily im­ply very much at all about the like­li­hood of ad­di­tional jobs open­ing up at these or­gani­sa­tions, or the com­pet­i­tive­ness of op­por­tu­ni­ties.

We pro­pose that these jobs be seen as great roles to aim for, but with a high risk of not work­ing out. If you think you might be a good fit, then look for cheap ways to test them out, but do this with a solid back-up plan, so you can eas­ily switch to some­thing else if it doesn’t work out. If you do get an offer, and you’re mo­ti­vated to take it, then it’s likely a top op­tion.

More broadly, we recom­mend us­ing the pro­cess here to gen­er­ate the best op­tions for you. Ul­ti­mately we should all be aiming for the best thing we can per­son­ally do.

Below, we go into some more depth on the rea­sons for the above.

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If an or­gani­sa­tion’s pre­vi­ous hire is re­ally worth hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars, let alone mil­lions, shouldn’t they be snap­ping up more staff mem­bers by the pound? Here are some pos­si­ble rea­sons that they aren’t:

The stan­dard ad­vice most new pro­jects get is to ‘hire slowly’ and only when you’re con­fi­dent it’s the right de­ci­sion. That’s what 80,000 Hours was told dur­ing Y Com­bi­na­tor, and we have stuck to it. Hiring quickly can cre­ate many prob­lems, such as greater difficulty co­or­di­nat­ing a team, con­fu­sion about how the or­gani­sa­tion works and what it’s try­ing to do, plus fac­to­rial growth in pos­si­ble sources of in­ter­per­sonal con­flict.

To get around these grow­ing pains, or­gani­sa­tions must in­vest in train­ing, re­la­tion­ship build­ing, and so on—but they can only do this so fast. The groups sur­veyed are all fairly small (un­der 30 peo­ple). If an or­gani­sa­tion has set it­self a max­i­mum per­centage growth rate, we can imag­ine it as hav­ing a limited num­ber of ‘hiring slots’ each year. In that cir­cum­stance, i) a *bet­ter* hire within that given num­ber of slots is very valuable, ii) a hire who has already made it past these bar­ri­ers is even more valuable still, but iii) many rea­son­able ap­pli­cants who aren’t one of the top few can­di­dates will have to be turned away, sim­ply be­cause they can’t on-board so many peo­ple si­mul­ta­neously.

A sin­gle ‘bad hire’ who be­comes a dis­grun­tled em­ployee, or ex-em­ployee, can de­mor­al­ise a team, and tem­porar­ily undo the work of sev­eral good hires. This rightly makes man­agers con­cerned about down­side risk. Even in well-run pro­jects, a sub­stan­tial frac­tion of hires usu­ally don’t stay for the long term, and end up be­ing a net drain to a pro­ject once the costs of find­ing and man­ag­ing them is ac­counted for. A de­gree of risk aver­sion can mean that even if the ex­pected value of new hires is high, you might still want to hire slowly.

“Trust bot­tle­necks” can be sig­nifi­cant and take a long time to re­solve. Many pro­jects don’t trust new staff mem­bers to do high-stakes tasks with­out a sub­stan­tial pe­riod of train­ing and men­tor­ship. Even some­one who usu­ally performs well could se­ri­ously screw up from time to time due to lack of ex­pe­rience. An or­gani­sa­tion may highly value some­one who knows enough that they trust them to ‘hit the ground run­ning’ with­out much over­sight, but place much less value on some­one who can’t.

Our ques­tion asked about re­tain­ing some­one who is already work­ing for you. The costs of find­ing those folks and con­vinc­ing them to work with you have already been paid and can’t be re­cov­ered. But when an or­gani­sa­tion looks for­ward, they know that hiring some­one else will be a difficult and time-con­sum­ing pro­cess that will have to in­volve se­nior staff. While an or­gani­sa­tion may place great fi­nan­cial value on good hires, it may place similarly great fi­nan­cial value on other things its man­agers alone can do—like mak­ing grants, writ­ing up re­ports, meet­ing gov­ern­ment offi­cials, and so on. If they de­cide to hire, then it’s very valuable for them to get bet­ter ap­pli­cants. But they might rea­son­ably de­cide it’s not worth the op­por­tu­nity cost of do­ing so.

An or­gani­sa­tion may not know what to do with ex­tra dona­tions, and so not value them very highly. This can blow out the num­ber of dona­tions they’d be will­ing to give up to re­tain some­one, even if they don’t value that ex­tra hire very much in ab­solute terms. (This is avoided if the sur­vey re­spon­dent con­sid­ers the op­tion of re­grant­ing the money, but we ex­pect they of­ten ne­glected this pos­si­bil­ity.)

An ap­pli­cant may in fact have the abil­ity to do a good job, but not yet be able to demon­strate it. Or­gani­sa­tions can only hire based on their per­cep­tion of how likely some­one is to work out.

Some­one could have the par­tic­u­lar abil­ities you’re look­ing for, but be ruled out for some other rea­son—for ex­am­ple, a poor abil­ity to re­solve in­ter­per­sonal con­flicts.

Some of the or­gani­sa­tions sur­veyed take pretty un­con­ven­tional moral or epistemic stances. This raises the im­por­tance of value al­ign­ment, be­cause they can’t count on com­mon-sense to keep some­one in sync with the rest of the team. This can un­for­tu­nately force them to turn away peo­ple who look suit­able on pa­per.

An or­gani­sa­tion re­port­ing be­ing ‘tal­ent con­strained’ doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily in­di­cate that they are about to hire a large num­ber of peo­ple.

An or­gani­sa­tion can be held back by hiring and still have a high bar to hire any­one.

The fact that a given pro­ject places high value on their pre­vi­ous hire, doesn’t im­ply that most read­ers should re­ori­ent their ca­reers around try­ing to work there. In­deed in one re­spect that in­for­ma­tion points in the other di­rec­tion: the rea­son they value that per­son so much may in fact be that there are very few pos­si­ble sub­sti­tutes, be­cause what they know or can do is es­pe­cially rare. Rather peo­ple should aim for those po­si­tions if do­ing so might be their com­par­a­tive ad­van­tage within the com­mu­nity.

We think our ar­ti­cles about the sur­vey and tal­ent gaps haven’t high­lighted the above as much as they should.

The num­bers in the sur­vey are most rele­vant to some­one who is offered a job at one of these pro­jects, and is de­cid­ing whether to do that, or earn to give, or do di­rect work el­se­where. Added: Though even then, in­so­far as they are only part way through the dis­cov­ery and train­ing pro­cess, the num­bers will still be in­flated.

One way around the bot­tle­neck de­scribed above is sug­gest­ing that our read­ers go work for larger es­tab­lished or­gani­sa­tions which have the ca­pac­ity to ab­sorb many more peo­ple si­mul­ta­neously, thanks to more ex­ist­ing staff or scale­able train­ing pro­cesses. Ex­am­ples of this could be gov­ern­ment agen­cies, ex­ist­ing foun­da­tions, or some forms of earn­ing to give. That is some­thing we will be try­ing to do more of over the next year.

My hunch is (as im­plied el­se­where) ‘tal­ent-con­straint’ with ‘tal­ent’ not fur­ther speci­fied is apt to mis­lead. My im­pres­sion for longter­mist orgs (I un­der­stand from Peter and oth­ers this may ap­ply less to orgs with­out this as the pre­dom­i­nant fo­cus) is there are two broad classes, which im­perfectly line up with ‘se­nior’ ver­sus ‘ju­nior’.

The ‘se­nior’ class prob­a­bly does fit (com­mensen­si­cally un­der­stood) ‘tal­ent-con­straint’, in that orgs or the wider ecosys­tem want to take ev­ery­one who clears a given bar. Yet these bars are high even when con­di­tioned on the already able co­hort of (longter­mist/​)EAs. It might be things like ‘ready to run a re­search group’, ‘can man­age op­er­a­tions for an org’ (cf. Tara’s and Tanya’s pod­casts), ‘sub­ject mat­ter ex­per­tise/​abil­ity/​track record’.

One com­mon fea­ture is that these peo­ple add lit­tle fur­ther load on cur­rent (limited) man­age­ment ca­pac­ity, ei­ther be­cause they are man­ag­ing oth­ers or are already ‘up to speed’ to con­tribute them­selves with­out ex­ten­sive train­ing or su­per­vi­sion. (Aside: I sus­pect this is a un­der-em­pha­sised bonus of ‘value-al­igned op­er­a­tions staff’ - their tacit knowl­edge of the com­mu­nity/​mis­sion/​wider ecosys­tem may per­mit looser man­age­ment than bring­ing on able pro­fes­sion­als ‘from out­side’.) From the per­spec­tive of the archety­pal ‘pluripo­tent EA’ a few years out from un­der­grad, these are skills which are hard to de­velop and harder to demon­strate.

More ‘ju­nior’ roles are those where the crite­ria are broader (at least in terms of leg­ible ones: ‘what it takes’ to be a good gen­er­al­ist re­searcher may be similarly rare to ‘what it takes’ to be a good tech­ni­cal AI safety re­searcher, but more can eas­ily ‘rule them­selves out’ of the lat­ter than the former), where ‘up­skil­ling’ is a ma­jor ob­jec­tive, or where there’s ex­pec­ta­tion of ex­ten­sive ‘hands-on’ man­age­ment.

There might be similarly con­vex re­turns to get­ting a slightly bet­ter top can­di­date (e.g. ‘ex­cel­lent ver­sus very good’ might be 3x rather than 1.3x). Re­gard­less, there will not be enough po­si­tions for all the tal­ented can­di­dates available: even if some­one at an org de­cided to spend their time only man­ag­ing and train­ing ju­nior staff (and haste con­sid­er­a­tions might lead them to spend­ing more of their time do­ing work them­selves than in­vest­ing in the ‘next gen­er­a­tion’), they can’t man­age dozens at a time.

I think con­fus­ing these two broad classes is an easy way of burn­ing a lot of good peo­ple (cf. Denise’s re­marks). If Alice the 23-year-old man­age­ment con­sul­tant might rea­son on cur­rent mes­sag­ing, “EA jobs are much bet­ter for the world than man­age­ment con­sul­tancy, and they’re af­ter good peo­ple—I seem to fit the bill, so I should switch ca­reer into this”. She might then for­sake her promis­ing early ca­reer for an uned­ify­ing and un­suc­cess­ful pe­riod as ‘EA peren­nial ap­pli­cant’, end­ing up worse than she was at the start. EA has a vo­ca­tional qual­ity to it—key it does not be­come a siren song.

There seem a few ways to do this bet­ter, as al­luded to in prior dis­cus­sions here and el­se­where:

0) If I’m right, it’d be worth com­mu­ni­cat­ing the ‘per­son spec’ for cases where (com­mon-sense) tal­ent con­straint ap­plies, and where we re­ally would ab­sorb ba­si­cally as many as we could get (e.g. “We want philoso­phers to con­tribute to GPR, and we’re af­ter peo­ple who ei­ther already have a pub­li­ca­tion record in this area, or have sig­nals of ‘su­per­star’ abil­ity even con­di­tioned on philos­o­phy academia. If this is you, please get in touch.“).

1) Con­cur­rently, it’d be worth pub­li­cis­ing typ­i­cal ap­pli­cants:place or similar mea­sures of com­pe­ti­tion for hiring rounds in more ju­nior roles to al­low ap­pli­cants to be bet­ter cal­ibrated/​em­pha­sise the im­por­tance of plan B. (e.g. “We have early-ca­reer roles for peo­ple think­ing of work­ing as GPR re­searchers, which serves the pur­pose of tal­ent iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and de­vel­op­ment. We gen­er­ally look for XYZ. Ap­pli­ca­tions for this are ex­tremely com­pet­i­tive (~12:1). Other good first steps for peo­ple who want to work in this field are these”). {MIRI’s re­search fel­lows page does a lot of this well}.

2) It would be good for there to be fur­ther work ad­dressed to avoid­ing ‘EA un­der­em­ploy­ment’, as I would guess growth in strong can­di­dates for EA roles will out­strip in­tra-EA op­por­tu­ni­ties. Some pos­si­bil­ities:

2.1) There are some ar­eas I’d want to add to the longter­mist port­fo­lio which might be broad­ened into use­ful niches for peo­ple with com­par­a­tive ad­van­tage in them (macro­his­tory, pro­duc­tivity coach­ing and nearby ver­sions, EA-rele­vant bits of psy­chol­ogy, etc.) I don’t think these are ‘eas­ier’ than the ex­ist­ing ‘hot’ ar­eas, but they are hard in differ­ent ways, and so broaden op­por­tu­ni­ties.

2.2) Another op­tion would be ‘pre-caching hu­man cap­i­tal’ into ar­eas which are plau­si­ble can­di­dates for be­com­ing im­por­tant as time goes on. I imag­ine some­thing like in­ter­na­tional re­la­tions turn­ing out to be cru­cial (or, con­trar­i­wise, rel­a­tively unim­por­tant), but it seems bet­ter rather than wait­ing for this to be figured out for in­stead peo­ple to co­or­di­nate and in­vest them­selves across the port­fo­lio of plau­si­ble can­di­dates. (Easier said than done from the first per­son per­spec­tive, as such a strat­egy po­ten­tially in­volves mak­ing an un­cer­tain bet with many years of one’s ca­reer, and if it turns out to be a bust ex post the good ex ante EV may not be com­plete con­so­la­tion).

2.3) There seem a lot of stake­hold­ers where it would be good for EAs to en­ter due to the sec­ond-or­der benefits even if their di­rect work is of limited di­rect rele­vance (e.g. hav­ing more EAs in tech com­pa­nies looks promis­ing to me, even if they aren’t do­ing AI safety). (Again, not easy from the first per­son-per­spec­tive).

2.4) A lot of skills for more ‘se­nior’ roles can and have been at­tained out­side of the EA com­mu­nity. Grad school is of­ten a good idea for re­searchers, and pro­fes­sional/​man­age­ment ap­ti­tude is of­ten a trans­fer­able skill. So some of the op­tions above can be seen as a hold­ing-pat­tern/​bet hedg­ing ap­proach: they hope­fully make one a stronger ap­pli­cant for such roles, but in the mean­while one is do­ing use­ful things (and also po­ten­tially earn­ing to give, al­though I think this should be a minor con­sid­er­a­tion for longter­mist EAs given the field is in­creas­ingly flush with cash).

If the fram­ing is changed to some­thing like, “Th­ese po­si­tions are very valuable, but very com­pet­i­tive—it is definitely worth you ap­ply­ing (as you in ex­pec­ta­tion in­crease the qual­ity of the ap­pointed can­di­date, and the re­turns of a slightly bet­ter can­di­date are very high), don’t bet the farm (or quit the day job) on your ap­pli­ca­tion—and if you don’t get in, here’s things you could do to slant your ca­reer to have a big­ger im­pact”, I’d hope the burn risk falls dra­mat­i­cally: in many fields there are lots of com­pet­i­tive over­sub­scribed po­si­tions which don’t im­pose huge costs to un­suc­cess­ful ap­pli­cants.

The nar­ra­tive that “EA is tal­ent con­strained” has had, as men­tioned, some nega­tive and un­in­tended con­se­quences. One more I’d like to add is that on this nar­ra­tive the ad­vised ac­tion “go work for a larger or­ga­ni­za­tion, like the gov­ern­ment” might feel for many peo­ple as failure or “not liv­ing up to their goals.” I’m afraid this leads to more value drift—peo­ple’s val­ues sid­ing away from EA-al­igned val­ues—be­cause they feel they’re not “liv­ing EA” any­way.

The prob­lem here is that peo­ple in the EA move­ment overtly as­so­ci­ate be­ing EA not with ‘do­ing high-im­pact things’ but with ‘do EA-ap­proved work, ideally at an EA org’.

It is not ob­vi­ous to me how this is fix­able. It doesn’t help that recom­men­da­tions change fre­quently, so that en­ter­ing paths that were ‘EA-ap­proved’ once aren’t any longer. As Greg said, peo­ple won’t want to risk that. It’s un­for­tu­nate that we pun­ish peo­ple for fol­low­ing pre­vi­ous recom­men­da­tions. This also doesn’t ex­actly in­cen­tivize peo­ple to fol­low cur­rent recom­men­da­tions and leads to EAs be­ing flakey, which is bad for long-term im­pact.

I think one thing that would be good for peo­ple is to have a bet­ter pro­fes­sional & do-good­ing net­work out­side of EA. If you are con­sid­er­ing en­ter­ing a pro­fes­sion, you can find ded­i­cated peo­ple there and co­or­di­nate. You can also find other do-good­ing com­mu­ni­ties. In both cases you can bring the moral mo­ti­va­tions and the em­piri­cal stan­dards to other al­igned peo­ple.

Thanks for mak­ing the ex ante ver­sus ex post dis­tinc­tion. But it makes me con­fused about the penul­ti­mate para­graph; if I am offered an job at an org and am com­par­ing to earn­ing to give, shouldn’t I be us­ing the (cur­rently un­pub­li­cised) ex ante num­bers, not these ex post num­bers?

The risks of bad per­sonal fit, costs of se­nior staff time, costs of fast hiring in gen­eral, and time taken to build trust are all still in the fu­ture at the point, and don’t ap­ply to the earn­ing to give al­ter­na­tive. As far as I can tell, the only cost which has already been sunk at that point is the cost of eval­u­at­ing me as a can­di­date. In my ex­pe­rience of work­ing on the re­cruit­ing side of a non-EA org, this is far smaller than the other costs out­lined, in par­tic­u­lar the costs of train­ing and build­ing trust. I’m cu­ri­ous if the EA orgs feel differ­ently.

In gen­eral though, I don’t think at­tempt­ing to save these num­bers by point­ing out how hiring is sub­tly much more ex­pen­sive than you would think in­ter­acts much with my ob­jec­tion to these num­bers, since each ad­di­tional rea­son you give me for why hiring is wildly ex­pen­sive for EA orgs is yet an­other rea­son to pre­fer earn­ing to give, pre­cisely be­cause it does not im­pose those costs! All these rea­sons sim­ply mean the num­bers should be lower than what you get from an ex post phras­ing of the ques­tion, at least in­so­far as they are be­ing used for what ap­pears to be their in­tended pur­pose, namely com­par­i­son of op­tions.

I wrote ‘most rele­vant’ to con­trast that group with peo­ple who know they’ll never be able to do di­rect work at the or­gani­sa­tions sur­veyed, for whom those figures are largely ir­rele­vant. As you say, they’re still not quite right for that group be­cause you’re only part way through the pro­cess (I think by the time you’re offered a job, about half the costs have been paid, though that de­pends on whether you had a trial pe­riod).

They would be even more rele­vant to some­one con­sid­er­ing quit­ting—but as they can talk to their col­leagues, they prob­a­bly wouldn’t be us­ing this sur­vey.

The costs of hiring makes ap­ply­ing to join a pro­ject look worse, but it also makes earn­ing to give to fund the salaries of new staff look worse too. If you’re ex­pect­ing to donate hop­ing the money will be used to fund new hires, it seems like it should can­cel out.

The three ways around bear­ing those costs that I can see at first glance are i) earn­ing to give to pre­vent a group from lay­ing off staff for lack of fund­ing, ii) earn­ing to give to buy cap­i­tal goods rather than hire peo­ple, iii) stay­ing in your cur­rent di­rect work job rather than switch­ing.

Since most of the EA orgs in ques­tion are heav­ily con­strained in hiring by what­ever level of growth they can man­age or feel com­fortable with (that’s kinda the whole point of the OP, right?), it would not gen­er­ally be my as­sump­tion that ad­di­tional funds would be used for ex­tra hiring com­pared to the coun­ter­fac­tual. I grant that if that is the as­sump­tion, these effects seem to can­cel.

Other ways not listed in your last para­graph.

-earn­ing to give to al­low orgs to raise salaries

-earn­ing to give to fund regranting

-earn­ing to give to fund things like tar­geted ad­ver­tis­ing (you may have in­tended to cover this cat­e­gory in ‘cap­i­tal goods’, I’m not sure)

Th­ese things are much closer to my model of where ex­tra fund­ing to at least CEA and 80k in at least the past 18 months has gone, not into ad­di­tional hiring.

A quick note on an­other as­pect that I think Rob might have un­der­em­pha­sised:

Hiring could gen­er­ate very high re­turns to the or­gani­sa­tions but of­ten not as high as other marginal ac­tivi­ties.

Here’s a sim­ple model: If you think that many EA orgs spend about $1m per year and gen­er­ate $10m per year of “value” (as rough or­ders of mag­ni­tude), then even if a marginal hire gen­er­ates $1m “ex­cess” value to the org, that’s only a 10% in­crease in im­pact for that year. This is good but there could eas­ily be even more im­por­tant things for se­nior man­age­ment to fo­cus on.

This would ex­plain why the orgs don’t hire many peo­ple.

How­ever, it would still be con­sis­tent with the idea that marginal hires are valuable and can have more im­pact by work­ing at the org than by earn­ing to give, since each gen­er­ates $1m.

It would also mean con­di­tional on an org run­ning a hiring pro­cess, it’s bet­ter for that pro­cess to go as well as pos­si­ble and get the best pos­si­ble ap­pli­cants.

In that sim­ple model, it ap­pears to me that marginal hires are worth $1m minus the coun­ter­fac­tual use of se­nior staff time (hy­po­thet­i­cally, and rele­vantly, sup­pose all the pos­si­ble hires for a po­si­tion de­cided to earn to give in­stead overnight. It would not be the case that the world was $1m worse off, be­cause now se­nior staff are freed up to do other things). If there are in fact even more im­por­tant things for se­nior man­age­ment to fo­cus on, this would be a nega­tive num­ber.

More re­al­is­ti­cally, we could as­sume orgs are pri­ori­tis­ing marginal hiring cor­rectly rel­a­tive to their other ac­tivi­ties (not ob­vi­ous to me, but a rea­son­able out­side view with­out delv­ing into the org par­tic­u­lars I think), in which case the value of a marginal ad­di­tional hire would sim­ply be ~0.

So again, I ap­pre­ci­ate the at­tempt to boil down the area of dis­agree­ment to the es­sen­tials, and even very largely agree with the es­sen­tial mod­els and de­scrip­tions you and Rob are us­ing as they hap­pen to match my ex­pe­rience work­ing and re­cruit­ing for a differ­ent tal­ent-con­strained or­gani­sa­tion, but feel like this kind of re­sponse is miss­ing the point I’m try­ing to make, namely that these ex post num­bers, even if ac­cu­rate on their own terms, are not par­tic­u­larly rele­vant for com­par­i­son of op­tions.

I agree with the thrust of your point: if hiring is very costly, then that’s rea­son against work­ing at EA orgs vs etg.

It still seems like there could be a world in which hiring is high re­turn but of­ten (but not always) lower re­turn than some other marginal ac­tivi­ties. This will mean both that (i) re­cent hires are valuable (ii) the orgs don’t hire many peo­ple (iii) hiring is some­times worth­while. I was just try­ing to show how these could be con­sis­tent.

Go­ing back to the over­all is­sue of why the dol­lar figures are high, I don’t think the “hiring is costly” point is the main thing go­ing on, and think this post might have em­pha­sised that too much. The post was more try­ing to an­swer the ques­tion of why the orgs don’t hire more of­ten de­spite the high dol­lar figures. The broader ques­tion of why the figures are high and what to do based on them is dis­cussed briefly in the origi­nal ar­ti­cle about the sur­vey, but hasn’t yet been tack­led in depth.

With your first two para­graphs, I just want to step back and point out that things get pretty con­fus­ing when you in­clude all op­por­tu­nity costs. When you do that, the re­turn of ev­ery ac­tion ex­cept the sin­gle best ac­tion is zero or nega­tive. Be­ing close to zero is ac­tu­ally good. It’s prob­a­bly less con­fus­ing to think in terms of a ranked list of ac­tions that se­nior staff could take.

I also ex­pect the orgs par­tially take ac­count of the op­por­tu­nity costs of staff time when re­port­ing the dol­lar value figures, though it’s hard to be sure. This is why next year we’ll fo­cus on in-depth in­ter­views to bet­ter un­der­stand the figures rather than re­peat­ing the sur­vey.

With your first two para­graphs, I just want to step back and point out that things get pretty con­fus­ing when you in­clude all op­por­tu­nity costs. When you do that, the re­turn of ev­ery ac­tion ex­cept the sin­gle best ac­tion is zero or nega­tive. Be­ing close to zero is ac­tu­ally good. It’s prob­a­bly less con­fus­ing to think in terms of a ranked list of ac­tions that se­nior staff could take.

True, but I haven’t ac­counted for all the op­por­tu­nity costs, just one of them, namely the ‘se­nior staff time’ op­por­tu­nity cost. If you are in fact close to 0 af­ter that cost alone (i.e. be­ing in a situ­a­tion where a new hire would use x time and gen­er­ate $1m, but an al­ter­na­tive org-im­prove­ment ac­tion that could be taken in­ter­nally would gen­er­ate $950k), that isn’t ‘good’, it’s awful, be­cause one of those ac­tions in­curs op­por­tu­nity costs on the ap­pli­cant side (namely, and at the risk of beat­ing a dead horse, the cost of not earn­ing to give), but the other does not.

So we could look at this as a ranked list of po­ten­tial se­nior staff ac­tions, but to do so use­fully the rank­ing needs to be de­ter­mined by num­bers that ac­count for all the costs and benefits to the wider world and only ex­clude se­nior staff time (i.e. use $1m minus op­por­tu­nity cost to ap­pli­cant minus salary minus fi­nan­cial cost of hiring pro­cess per suc­cess­ful hire etc.), not this gross $1m num­ber.

Similarly, po­ten­tial ap­pli­cants to EA orgs mak­ing a ranked list of their op­tions should in­clude all costs and benefits that aren’t tied to them, i.e. they should sub­tract se­nior staff time from the $1m num­ber, if that hasn’t been done for them already. Which is what I’ve in fact been recom­mend­ing peo­ple do. But my ex­pe­rience is that peo­ple who haven’t been di­rectly in­volved in hiring dur­ing their ca­reer rad­i­cally un­der­es­ti­mate the cost of hiring, and many ap­pli­cants fall into that camp, so for them to take ac­count of this is not triv­ial. I mean, it’s not triv­ial for the orgs ei­ther, but I do think it is rel­a­tively eas­ier.

I also ex­pect the orgs par­tially take ac­count of the op­por­tu­nity costs of staff time when re­port­ing the dol­lar value figures, though it’s hard to be sure. This is why next year we’ll fo­cus on in-depth in­ter­views to bet­ter un­der­stand the figures rather than re­peat­ing the sur­vey.

Given this con­ver­sa­tion, I’m pretty skep­ti­cal of that? My ex­pe­rience with talk­ing to EA org lead­ers is that if I beat this horse pretty hard they back down on in­flated num­bers or add caveats, but oth­er­wise they say things that sound very like ‘How­ever, it would still be con­sis­tent with the idea that marginal hires are valuable and can have more im­pact by work­ing at the org than by earn­ing to give, since each gen­er­ates $1m.’, a state­ment it sounds like we now both agree is false or at least apt to mis­lead peo­ple who could earn to give for slightly less than $1m into think­ing they should switch when they shouldn’t.

For the benefit of third par­ties read­ing this thread, I have had con­ver­sa­tions in this area with Ben and other org lead­ers in the past, and I ac­tu­ally think Ben thinks about these is­sues more clearly than al­most any­body else I’ve spo­ken to. So the above para­graph should not be read as a crit­i­cism of him per­son­ally, rather a state­ment that ‘if you can slip up and get this wrong, ev­ery­body else is definitely get­ting this wrong, and I spec­u­late that you might be pro­ject­ing a bit when you state they are get­ting it right’. The only thing Ben per­son­ally has done here is been kind enough to put the model in writ­ing where I can more-eas­ily poke holes in it.

I’m feel­ing a bit set upon here. I was talk­ing about a differ­ent topic (why peo­ple hire slowly) and it seems like we got our wires crossed and are now de­bat­ing the value of a marginal hire. Look­ing back, I see how my ear­lier com­ment led us off in a con­fus­ing di­rec­tion.

If we’re dis­cussing the value of a marginal hire, I to­tally agree that the sur­vey figures DON’T in­clude the costs of hiring some­one in the first place. That’s why I brought up the ex-ante ex-post dis­tinc­tion in the first place.

This means that some­one con­sid­er­ing work­ing at an EA org should use a lower figure for the es­ti­mate of their value-add (we agree). In par­tic­u­lar, they should sub­tract the op­por­tu­nity costs of the time spent hiring them. (This varies a lot on the situ­a­tion, but one month of se­nior staff time seems like a rea­son­able bal­l­park to me.)

How­ever, just to be clear, I don’t think they should sub­tract the op­por­tu­nity costs of se­nior staff time spent on their on-go­ing man­age­ment, since I think the nat­u­ral in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the sur­vey ques­tion in­cludes these. (If a new hire could raise $1m of dona­tions, but would take up man­age­ment time that could have raised $800k oth­er­wise and has a salary of $100k, it would be odd for the org say that they’d need to be com­pen­sated with $1m if the hire dis­ap­peared. Rather, the an­swer should be $100k. I ex­pect most orgs were aiming to in­clude these costs, though of course they might not have made a good es­ti­mate. This is what I thought you were talk­ing about when I said I think orgs par­tially take op­por­tu­nity costs into ac­count.)

Where does this leave the sur­vey figures? We could su­per roughly es­ti­mate the value of a month of se­nior staff time at an org is 5x the value of a month of ju­nior staff time, so this would su­per roughly re­duce the value of ju­nior hires over three years by 5⁄36 = 14%.

This makes me feel more strongly that there should be a sep­a­rate ca­reer ad­vice or­ga­ni­za­tion fo­cused on near term causes. (See here for my origi­nal com­ment propos­ing this idea.)

A near term ca­reer ad­vice or­ga­ni­za­tion could do the fol­low­ing:

Write in-depth prob­lem pro­files on causes that could be con­sid­ered to be among the most press­ing from a near term per­spec­tive but that are not con­sid­ered to be among the most press­ing from a long term per­spec­tive (e.g. U.S. crim­i­nal jus­tice re­form, de­vel­op­ing coun­try men­tal health, policy ap­proaches to global poverty, food in­no­va­tion ap­proaches to an­i­mal suffer­ing, biomed­i­cal re­search fo­cused on ag­ing)

Write in-depth ca­reer re­views of ca­reers that could be con­sid­ered to be among the high­est im­pact from a near term per­spec­tive but that are not con­sid­ered to be among the high­est im­pact from a long term per­spec­tive (e.g. ca­reers that cor­re­spond with the prob­lems listed in the pre­vi­ous bul­let point, spe­cific op­tions in the global poverty space, spe­cific op­tions in the an­i­mal suffer­ing space)

Pro­duce a pod­cast that fo­cuses on in­ter­view­ing peo­ple work­ing on is­sues that could be con­sid­ered to be among the most press­ing from a near term per­spec­tive but that are not con­sid­ered to be among the most press­ing from a long term perspective

Be­come deeply fa­mil­iar with the global poverty space, the an­i­mal suffer­ing space, and other cause ar­eas that are much more likely to be pri­ori­tized by near term peo­ple and form close con­nec­tions to or­ga­ni­za­tions work­ing in such cause areas

Provide job post­ings, ca­reer coach­ing, and refer­rals based on the in­for­ma­tion gained through the pre­vi­ous bul­let point

I think the pro­posed or­ga­ni­za­tion would ac­tu­ally com­ple­ment 80,000 Hours by ex­pand­ing the num­ber of cause ar­eas for which there’s in-depth ca­reer ad­vice and coach­ing; the two or­ga­ni­za­tions could even es­tab­lish a part­ner­ship where they re­fer peo­ple to each other as ap­pro­pri­ate.

(As noted in my origi­nal com­ment, I think it’s bet­ter to have a sep­a­rate or­ga­ni­za­tion do this since a long-term fo­cused or­ga­ni­za­tion un­der­stand­ably wants to fo­cus its efforts on causes that are effec­tive from its per­spec­tive.)

This ap­proach could have var­i­ous benefits in­clud­ing:

di­rectly in­creas­ing im­pact by pro­vid­ing bet­ter ad­vice to in­di­vi­d­ual EAs who are un­able to con­tribute to causes that are con­sid­ered to be among the most press­ing from a long term perspective

benefit­ing the long-term space by keep­ing in­di­vi­d­u­als who have the po­ten­tial to con­tribute to the long term space in­volved with EA while they gain more skills and experience

benefit­ing the long-term space by in­creas­ing the num­ber of peo­ple who are able to benefit from EA ca­reer ad­vice and thus the num­ber of peo­ple who will re­fer oth­ers to 80,000 Hours (di­rectly or through this pro­posed or­ga­ni­za­tion)

80,000 Hours would likely be sup­port­ive of an­other or­gani­sa­tion spe­cial­is­ing in global health or fac­tory farm­ing ca­reer ad­vis­ing. I’d pre­fer to di­vide up by prob­lem ar­eas, rather than long vs. short term. We plan to write more about this.

A first thought I have is “if the cur­rent or­ga­ni­za­tions can­not grow fast enough to use all the available tal­ent, why not in­crease the growth rate of the move­ment?” That is, should we start more (paid) pro­jects?

I think there is a case to be made that we should: there seem to be many small pro­jects with ca­pa­ble peo­ple seek­ing fund­ing. They are not as effec­tive per em­ployee as some of the core or­ga­ni­za­tions, but the core or­ga­ni­za­tions don’t need the money. I don’t hold this opinion strongly, and I’m cu­ri­ous what other peo­ple think.

Is it fair to sum­ma­rize the the­sis as: there is heaps of su­per-valuable tal­ent out there but the main rea­son we can’t cash it is that it can’t be ab­sorbed into ex­ist­ing man­age­rial struc­tures?

If so, then shouldn’t we be ad­vo­cat­ing ag­gres­sively for ab­sorb­ing the tal­ent through greater fund­ing of and more in­fras­truc­ture for new EA orgs and EA con­trac­tor roles?

No, I don’t think it’s that sim­ple. I think it’s some­times true that the main is­sue is ab­sorb­ing tal­ent, but there are also situ­a­tions when the top hire is much bet­ter than the sec­ond best, so gen­er­ates a large ex­cess value. This is be­cause many of these roles re­quire a very un­usual skill-set.

I think the mes­sage to take away is more like “it’s hard to in­fer what to do based on the sur­vey figures”.

Per­son­ally, I still think it would be very use­ful to find more tal­ented peo­ple and for more peo­ple to con­sider ap­ply­ing to these roles; we just need to bear in mind that these roles re­quire a very un­usual skill-set, so peo­ple should always have a good back-up plan.

Per­son­ally, I still think it would be very use­ful to find more tal­ented peo­ple and for more peo­ple to con­sider ap­ply­ing to these roles; we just need to bear in mind that these roles re­quire a very un­usual skill-set, so peo­ple should always have a good back-up plan.

I’m cu­ri­ous what your model of the % value in­crease in the top hire is when you, say, dou­ble cur­rent hiring pools. It needs to be high enough to offset the burnt value from peo­ple’s in­vest­ments in those ap­pli­ca­tion pro­cesses. This is not only ex­pen­sive for in­di­vi­d­ual ap­pli­cants in the mo­ment, but also car­ries the long term risk of de­mo­ti­vat­ing peo­ple—and thereby hav­ing a coun­ter­fac­tu­ally smaller hiring pool in fu­ture years.

EA seems to be already at the point where lots of ap­pli­cants are frus­trated and might value drift, thereby drop­ping out of the hiring pool. I am not keen on mak­ing this situ­a­tion worse. It might cause per­ma­nent harm.

Do you agree there’s a trade-off here? If so, I’m not sure whether our dis­agree­ment comes from differ­ent as­sess­ments of value in­creases in the top hire or burnt value in the hiring pool.

I just want to note that not ev­ery re­jected ap­pli­ca­tion has been burnt value for me and most have ac­tu­ally been pos­i­tive, es­pe­cially in terms of things learned. In the ones I got far it has re­sulted in more rather than less mo­ti­va­tion. In the case I had to do work-re­lated tasks (write re­search pro­posal, or ex­e­cute a sam­ple of typ­i­cal re­search) I learned a lot.

On the other hand, in­creas­ing the ap­pli­cants:hired-ra­tio would mostly in­crease the pro­por­tion of peo­ple not get­ting far in the ap­pli­ca­tion pro­cess which is where least of the value pos­i­tive fac­tors are and most of the nega­tive.

Oh I agree peo­ple will of­ten learn use­ful things dur­ing ap­pli­ca­tion pro­cesses. I just think the op­por­tu­nity cost can be very high, es­pe­cially when pro­cesses take months and peo­ple have to wait to figure out whether they got into their top op­tions.
I also think those costs are es­pe­cially high in the top ap­pli­cants—they have to in­vest the most and might learn the most use­ful things, but they also lose the most due to higher op­por­tu­nity costs.

And as you said, peo­ple who get filtered out early lose less time and other re­sources on ap­pli­ca­tion pro­cesses. But they might still feel nega­tively about it, es­pe­cially given the mes­sag­ing. Maybe their equally re­jected friends feel just as bad, which in the fu­ture could dis­suade other friends who might be po­ten­tial top hires to even try.

Per­son­ally, I still think it would be very use­ful to find more tal­ented peo­ple and for more peo­ple to con­sider ap­ply­ing to these roles (Ben)

It needs to be high enough to offset the burnt value from peo­ple’s in­vest­ments in those ap­pli­ca­tion pro­cesses. (Denise)

In the­ory, there’s no real con­flict be­tween these two state­ments. Dou­bling the num­ber of peo­ple who would con­sider ap­ply­ing for a post shouldn’t im­pose a ma­jor cost on those po­ten­tial ap­pli­cants. At the same time, we could take steps to make it clearer to po­ten­tial ap­pli­cants what ex­actly the hiring crite­ria is, so we’re not wast­ing peo­ple’s time.

In fact, I think it would prob­a­bly be ideal if we in­creased the num­ber of peo­ple who con­sider ap­ply­ing for each EA job but de­creased the num­ber ac­tu­ally ap­ply­ing!

I agree there’s a trade­off. We’re pretty un­sure about how much to en­courage peo­ple to­wards these roles at the mar­gin.

We’ve seen cases of peo­ple on the other side who said they didn’t ap­ply for these roles since they as­sumed they were too com­pet­i­tive, but were found later and ended up do­ing re­ally well. We’ve seen lots of cases of peo­ple who ended up get­ting the job but said they al­most didn’t ap­ply for the same rea­son. I sus­pect we still miss a lot of great ap­pli­cants.

To avoid this, we could en­courage more peo­ple to ap­ply, but that will re­sult in more peo­ple get­ting de­mo­ti­vated when they don’t suc­ceed. Find­ing the ideal bal­anc­ing point seems re­ally hard.

I do agree with Khor­ton be­low, though, that we should try to find more “win-win” ap­proaches, such as en­courag­ing peo­ple to con­sider and find out if there might be a good role for them, and pro­vid­ing peo­ple with clearer crite­ria.

It seems like the rea­sons listed why or­ga­ni­za­tions who value tal­ent highly aren’t hiring cen­ter on a growth con­straint that can’t be alle­vi­ated by money or tal­ent. If there is this growth con­straint, then doesn’t it just mean we should fo­cus el­se­where, i.e. by do­ing ac­tivi­ties in­de­pen­dent of these or­ga­ni­za­tions? It seems like if or­ga­ni­za­tions have slightly more room for tal­ent than money, but ul­ti­mately lit­tle room for ei­ther, then their rel­a­tive prefer­ence be­tween the two shouldn’t mat­ter much, no?

Re­cruit­ing is a thing and an EA org with the funds should be will­ing to con­sult with the best in the world if it’s a one time cost to do so and you can do judg­men­tal boot­strap­ping on their mod­els and tech­niques.

My gen­eral sense is that EA orgs should put more effort into as­cer­tain­ing what cur­rent best-in-class prac­tice is in the differ­ent do­mains they op­er­ate in, be­fore they be­gin build­ing out their own method­ol­ogy. (weakly held)

Since this looks like it was writ­ten par­tially in re­sponse to me, I’d like to re­ply. First, I ap­pre­ci­ate the clar­ifi­ca­tion. It is very helpful and I definitely agree with most of it.

It strikes me that the ac­tual prob­lem here is one of mes­sag­ing. By get­ting EA orgs to list very large figures for their hires and talk about tal­ent gaps writ large, you risk mis­lead­ing EAs into think­ing that they should be fo­cus­ing on ap­ply­ing or up­skil­ling for these jobs in par­tic­u­lar, when the ac­tual value of do­ing so may be less than it ap­pears (though still po­ten­tially large). It seems like it would be far more in­for­ma­tive to ask EAs to place figures on fu­ture hires or dis­cuss more de­tail about how ex­actly they feel con­strained or bot­tle­necked.

Also, if EA orgs are bet­ter in­formed that there ac­tu­ally are a lot of tal­ented ap­pli­cants out there, per­haps these orgs may in­vest more in figur­ing out how to pro­duc­tively bring on more peo­ple.

I ap­pre­ci­ate this fol­low up as well. Peter and I seem to be of similar think­ing here and in his com­ment on the other post, but just to add:

I don’t think the mi­s­un­der­stand­ing stems as much from the re­cent-hire val­u­a­tions, as from terms like “tal­ent bot­tle­neck” and “tal­ent con­strained”. Espe­cially “tal­ent con­strained” used alongside “fund­ing con­strained”. I could be mis­taken, but it would seem odd to say you’re “fund­ing con­strained” but can’t use more fund­ing at the mo­ment. Whereas we are say­ing orgs are “tal­ent con­strained” but can’t make use of available tal­ent. They ev­i­dently don’t func­tion quite the same, so phras­ing them in this matched sort of way in­vites er­ro­neous com­par­i­son.

Similarly, I feel a “tal­ent bot­tle­neck” im­plies an in­suffi­cient sup­ply of tal­ent/​ap­pli­cants, which doesn’t seem to be the case. I guess it’s more that there’s in­suffi­cient tal­ent ac­tu­ally work­ing on the prob­lems, but it’s not a mat­ter of sup­ply, so it’s more of a “hiring bot­tle­neck” or an “or­ga­ni­za­tional ca­pac­ity bot­tle­neck”.

EA orgs aren’t so much con­strained by a lack of available tal­ent as they are con­strained by their ca­pac­ity to de­ploy ad­di­tional talent

It seems like it would be far more in­for­ma­tive to ask EAs to place figures on fu­ture hires

I had the same thought that it might be more in­for­ma­tive to know EA lead­ers an­swers to some­thing like, “I’d rather have $X in ad­di­tional dona­tions than my next ideal hire.” Agree that it’s difficult to know how a fu­ture hire will work out, but maybe there’s still some­thing to be learned from the value they’d place on an ad­di­tional ideal hire, as it wouldn’t nec­es­sar­ily be the same as hold­ing on to a re­cent suc­cess­ful hire. I’m ad­mit­tedly out of my depth here.

Hey Peter—it’s partly for you, but also many other peo­ple who have the same ques­tions.

I can com­ment on the choice of ques­tion in the sur­vey as I’m the one who wrote it.

The rea­son we went for an ex post as­sess­ment rather than an ex ante one was that we thought peo­ple would be able to more re­li­ably as­sess how they feel about a pre­vi­ous hire to­day, than re­mem­ber how they felt about a pre­vi­ous hire in the past.

Ask­ing peo­ple to re­mem­ber what they thought be­fore runs the risk that they will sub­sti­tute a hard ques­tion (what they thought months ago be­fore they knew how some­one would work out) for an easy ques­tion (what do they think given what they know now). Then we’d get a similar an­swer, but it would look ex ante when it ac­tu­ally isn’t.

It also seemed quite difficult for or­gani­sa­tions to fore­cast how much they’ll value a typ­i­cal hire in the fu­ture be­cause, among other rea­sons, it’s difficult to an­ti­ci­pate how suc­cess­ful fu­ture searches will be.

In ret­ro­spect I think the fram­ing we chose was prob­a­bly a mis­take, be­cause the two as­sess­ments are much more differ­ent than most read­ers un­der­stand them to be. I agree with your sug­ges­tions for im­prove­ments and, in­deed, we con­cluded our blog post with our plans to ask new ques­tions next year or else in­ter­view a smaller num­ber of peo­ple in more depth.

Hope­fully a differ­ent ap­proach next year will help us avoid this con­fu­sion go­ing for­ward.

As for the ar­ti­cle be­ing mis­lead­ing, we’ve:

i) Com­mented that these roles are hard to fill at the point when these figures are first men­tioned.

ii) Ex­plained the ex post, ex ante dis­tinc­tion in the rele­vant sec­tion, and now added a link to this post.

iii) Noted we don’t have much con­fi­dence in the an­swers to that ques­tion and would not recom­mend that peo­ple up­date very much based on it.